Riding Giants

The documentary tells the history of big wave surfing. It starts at Waimea Bay in Hawaii in the 1950s, when the boards were heavy and nobody knew what would happen. Then the boards got lighter and the waves got bigger. It moves through three figures: Greg Noll, the fearless rider of the fifties and sixties; Jeff Clark, who found Mavericks and surfed it alone for years; and Laird Hamilton, who made towing into a wave behind a jet ski the ordinary way of doing it. Stacy Peralta both directs and narrates. It opened Sundance in 2004, the first documentary ever chosen to open the festival. It treats surfing not as a sport but as a person knowingly putting himself under something enormous.